I stared at the light peeking in beneath the door, but didn’t move.
Dustin sighed. “Well, I’m here.”
I was still here too, I thought, but last night I had drifted somewhere else. Was it an accident? In my dream, it didn’t seem like she was hunting anyone. It seemed like I was hunting her.
I didn’t open the door. Instead, I sat against the wall beneath the window, listening to the rain trickle down the side of the house until I fell asleep.
When I woke up, the rain had stopped and the house was quiet. I rubbed my eyes and stood up, unlocking the door and nearly tripping over Dustin, who was sitting on the floor outside, dozing off next to a tray with a teapot, two cups, and a plate of butter cookies.
“Renée,” he said, shaking himself awake. Hoisting himself up, he reached for the tray. “I thought you might need something to warm you up,” he said, and carried it into the library.
He folded his legs into the small space beside me and sat down between the piles of books. There he adjusted his jacket and gave me a sad smile. “This is a cozy spot you’ve made. A nice reading selection,” he said, gesturing to a pile of books by Aristotle. He used them as a table while he poured me a cup of tea, which was now cold. “You know, Annette LaBarge came to the house with your mother every summer when they were at Gottfried together,” he said, gazing out the window at the wet, green lawn. “She was a lovely girl.”
“It feels like everyone around me is dying,” I murmured.
“That’s what happens when you get older.”
“But I’m not old.”
“You’re a Monitor. I used to be one too, you know, and look at me.” Wincing, he adjusted his knees. “Time passes differently with us. Life, death—sometimes it all seems like a dream.”
His words made me shudder. “A dream?”
Dustin nodded.
I wanted to tell him what I had seen in my sleep, and to ask him what it meant. I wanted him to tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that it was a coincidence. But I couldn’t. What if he told my grandfather? That would only add to my problems.
I studied his fleshy hands, the skin covered with age spots. “You were a Monitor?”
“I was.” He leaned over and took two cookies from the plate, offering me one. “Go on.”
I turned away, unable to look at it. “What if I don’t know how to?”
Dustin furrowed his brow. “Don’t know how to what?”
“Just go on.”
“It will happen whether you know how to or not,” he said. “After all, what else can we do?”
Chapter 2
I WOKE UP IN THE LIBRARY, MY FACE PLANTED IN the middle of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, to the sound of a horn honking. After my conversation with Dustin, time had seemed stretched out, as though the forty-eight hours had been one unbearably long moment. I had wandered in and out of the library in a daze, hoping the news of Miss LaBarge’s death had been a nightmare, but it wasn’t. The seventeen-item breakfast that Dustin had prepared for me had sat on the kitchen counter until one of the cooks scraped it into the garbage. Even though the staff was going about their normal work, knowing that Miss LaBarge was dead made the mansion feel drafty and deserted, as if everyone else had died along with her.
Miss LaBarge had an accident while hunting an Undead. That’s what Dustin kept telling me. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Why had she been there alone, when I knew that Monitors always worked in pairs? Or more importantly, why had she been hunting at all? The little I’d gleaned from my mother’s Monitoring books had taught me that all Monitors eventually specialized—burying, researching, judging, teaching, coffin building.…There was an order to tracking and hunting the Undead; we didn’t just go out and bury them. Especially not professors, like Miss LaBarge, who had dedicated their lives to teaching the Undead and Monitors how to coexist. So why would she have traveled across several states to hunt one?
“Why?” I’d begged Dustin, when he couldn’t give me an explanation. As if finding out the answer would somehow erase her mistakes.
Leaning over, I pushed the curtains aside and peered out the window. It was a crisp, blue day, so bright it made me wince. My grandfather’s car was parked at the end of the crescent driveway, the doors open as Dustin struggled to carry in two stacks of papers, a briefcase, and a traveling bag.
I went into the hall just as my grandfather thrust himself into the foyer, his coattails swooping in behind him. His wrinkled face was tanned, like his old leather briefcase.
“Did you hear that Miss LaBarge—” I started to say, but my grandfather waved his hand to quiet me.
“I’m aware of what happened.” He took off his coat and draped it over the pile of things Dustin was balancing in his arms.
“Do they know who—”
“I don’t know, Renée,” he said, his face softening while he studied me. “I’m sorry.” He took off his hat and dropped it on top of his coat. Dustin gave him a perfunctory nod before whisking everything away.